The new investigator in the popular ZDF crime series “Die Toten vom Bodensee” uses Werner as her first name in real life—at least as an artist. The Vienna-born actress Anna Werner Friedmann explains the unusual choice in an interview with the German Press Agency as follows: “My stage name is a blend of my own name, the name of my mother, and the name of my father.”
Even toward the end of her acting training, she adopted the surname Friedmann for the stage, taken from her mother’s lineage, said the 33-year-old. “Werner is the given name of my father, and from him I got everything that makes me an actress. Besides, he is already 80, and since there’s no thought of grandchildren yet, I figured a nicer way to honor him would be to weave his name into my stage name as well.”
It has always been important to her to separate her professional name from her private one, “since acting is a very personal profession in which you put a lot of yourself into it,” Friedmann said. “But I didn’t want to conjure up a stage name that merely sounds funny or looks good. I wanted to endow it with meaning. And then I thought: If Klaus Maria Brandauer can exist, there can also be an Anna Werner Friedmann.”
In “Die Toten vom Bodensee” the Berlin-based Detective Inspector Mara Eisler is at the center. Her first appearance is in the episode “The Wish Tree” on Monday, October 27 at 8:15 p.m. on ZDF. Taking over from Alina Fritsch, Friedmann will henceforth appear alongside Matthias Koeberlin, who plays Micha Oberländer and will continue solving cases in the border region with Austria.
